Read Part 1 today, and stay tuned for Part 2 tomorrow—and your chance to vote for the winner.
Conan, by Belinkie
The clangor of the swords had died away, the shouting of the slaughter was hushed; silence lay on the red-stained snow. The bleak pale sun that glittered so blindingly from the ice-fields and the snow-covered plains struck sheens of silver from rent corselet and broken blade, where the dead lay as they had fallen. The nerveless hand yet gripped the broken hilt; helmeted heads back-drawn in the death-throes, tilted red beards and golden beards grimly upward, as if in last invocation to Ymir the frost-giant, god of a warrior-race.
Goddamnit, Robert E. Howard, you are a magnificent bastard! I love the way this guy writes. He just goes for it, you know? A lot of people will dismiss this as pretentious cheese, and maybe it is. But it’s the most glorious pretentious cheese ever put to paper.
Now I’m not going to deny that the second Conan film, Conan the Destroyer, is pretty weak sauce. (For starters, the producers wanted the violence toned down to get a PG rating.) But the third film is already written, and by all accounts it is awesome. It’s by the screenwriter of the original, John Milius, and it’s called King Conan: Crown of Iron. The title alone makes me happy.
I’m just going to quote some of the awesomeness that this screenplay contains, as recorded in this script review. Here’s Conan, imparting some wisdom to his young son.
CONAN: Remember how I showed you my father’s sword?
KON: Yes.
CONAN: It was not my father’s. I broke my father’s sword with mine. He told me to trust steel, not men, women, animals. I trust nothing but my will and instinct. Trust no one, boy… not any of this. If gods live here, they are treacherous and dark. Trust no one but the wind and the cold night sky. Make them your friends and you won’t need this. You won’t need me.
KON: I’ll always need you, father.
CONAN: No… someday you must break my sword. Now let us go and eat their beeves and pigs and watch their women dance for us.
Look, am I crazy, or is this the greatest screenplay ever written? I’m imagining this on the big screen, with Arnold staring into the distance like the proud warrior he is, and I want it. Bad. And by the way, “beeves” is a real word. I checked it out.
One more quote, then I’ll give it a rest. Remember Conan’s prayer to Crom in the first movie? Well, he’s got another one here:
CONAN: Crom! Again we are here. One thing I know… you are watching, you old wolf! The odds are long again, you enjoy that. If I die, we will meet in Valhalla, I will eat at your table. And if I live, you will find other ways to torture me. (Conan salutes the sky.) I hope you enjoy it!
And besides, I’d bet Arnold doesn’t want to be a berserker who chops people’s heads off by the dozens. He wants to be family-friendly. And that is a damn shame, because this could easily be one of his greatest movies ever.
So Crom! I know not if you hear my words. You delight in taunting us fanboys with shadows of things that can never be. But grant me this one request: grant me Crown of Iron!
And if you do not listen, then to hell with you.
Mad Max – Perich
Whatever happened to the post-apocalypse genre?
You get Mad Max (1981), technically a sequel to 1979’s The Road Warrior, which gave the world Mel Gibson. You get Mad Max Beyond Thunderdome (1985), a beautifully weird classic. And then what?
Sadly, just as Star Wars spawned a bunch of B-movie imitators, none of Mad Max’s successors could approach, much less surpass, its genius. We got a bunch of preachy imitators in the 90s – Waterworld, The Postman – but nothing that echoed Mad Max’s grim existentialism and furious action.
So rather than try to top it, let’s just remake it. Hollywood executives will want to capitalize on the (hopeful) success of The Road; this is a perfect opportunity.
If peak oil not only comes true, but turns out worse than anyone predicted, America is screwed.
The cities on America’s coasts rely on the trucking industry for their food supply. If petroleum becomes prohibitively expensive, food riots and starvation will follow. And while America’s heartlands might be closer to the food, the inhabitants won’t be able to get anywhere. As the social fabric breaks down, power shuts off, groundwater starts to go bad and plagues ravage the land.
Into this mess comes Sergeant Max Rockatansky, a cop from a small town just outside Peoria, IL. He keeps showing up for work every day with a diminishing band of like-minded officers, answering to no one but their own codes of honor. They fight off looters, quarantine plague victims and defend against the occasional siege. The people of Gibson, IL don’t care what you’ve done – they just want to know if you have bullets, water or gas to trade.
When a new type of plague strikes Gibson, Rockatansky packs up his family and sets out on the road to Chicago. He evades mantraps, tends to his family’s injuries and tries to hide his fear from them. But a recurring enemy poses the biggest threat – a roving gang of bandits based out of the big city.
The first time he meets them leads to a tense staredown, but no confrontation.
The second time, they come at night. He drives them off, but at the cost of a severe wound.
The third time, they take his wife and son.
What follows is a grim chase for vengeance up the decaying remains of Route 57. Max kills bandits with the use of Molotov cocktails, homemade pipe bombs, rusty chainsaws and the occasional car crash. He leaves a terrible trail of slaughter behind him, right up to the outskirts of Chicago. A game of cat-and-mouse among the darkened skyscrapers on Lake Michigan climaxes the story.
Now tell me that doesn’t sound better than Terminator:Salvation.
Airplane/Police Squad/Top Secret/The Naked Gun/Etc. – Stokes
I’m cheating a little here: first of all, this isn’t a franchise, it’s two franchises and an isolated movie that happen to be made by the same creative team. It’s also not exclusively an 80s phenomenon. The second two Naked Gun movies were in the 90s, as was the Hot Shots series (which I left out for that reason). In fact, this “franchise” never really stopped at all: one of the Zucker brothers is involved with the Scary Movie series, which is clearly the heir to this tradition.
So why does the Zucker Abrahams Zucker slapstick genre-parody need to be revived? Basically, because the Scary Movie series sucks. I want a revival of the good genre-parody. I happened to watch a chunk of the original Naked Gun a few days back, and I was struck by how – oh, what’s the word? oh yes – how WATCHABLE it was. And more than watchable, fun. Here’s the thing that those early ZAZ parodies got right, that the likes of Meet the Spartans gets wrong: they didn’t parody actions or characters. Or rather, they did, but that was never the point. The current parody movies are all about the comedy of recognition: when you see someone get kicked into the pit of death in Meet the Spartans, it is funny (or rather “funny”) precisely because you remember that scene in 300. This is about the lowest joke you can possibly make. It’s bad enough when writers peg the humor of recognition on something obscure, and you find yourself laughing just to prove that you got the reference: here the references are solidly mainstream… the masonic handshake is just a damn handshake.
Contrast this with the best of the ZAZ films—and here I’m talking about the original Airplane, Top Secret, and the original Naked Gun—where the parodies were funny even if you didn’t know what they were making fun of. (I, and I think for a large portion of my generation, saw Airplane a solid TEN YEARS before I saw Saturday Night Fever, and I still haven’t seen From Here to Eternity.) The brilliance of these movies is that they would seize on some aspect of the original movie’s aesthetics that was already faintly ridiculous, and play it up until it’s supremely ridiculous. You might get a little more out of it if you get the reference, but it’s strictly optional.
And of course, most of the jokes in these movies weren’t parody jokes at all… they were just sight gags, vaudeville quips, or slapstick. But check out the sunglasses scene at 5:00 in. That’s what I’m talking about: it works because scenes where someone whips off their sunglasses are always, always silly.
Arguably there are people still making this kind of parody. You don’t need to have actually seen a bunch of old zombie movies to get a kick out of Shaun of the Dead, and Not Another Teen Movie was, against all odds, actually pretty solid (although note that it’s specific-scene parodies of American Pie, Cruel Intentions, and Rudy were far and away the worst parts). So it’s not like there’s a crucial void in the cultural landscape of Hollywood that needs to be filled… But I want the Dance Flick‘s of the world to shape the hell up. Come on, people, look alive out there! We can do better. It is possible to make a parody movie that is entertaining, and funny, and even one that says something smart about the genre it’s making fun of. Let me be clear, I’m not suggesting that Zucker-Abrahams-Zucker are the guys to do it. Those dudes are tapped out… but it can be done. Won’t someone please do it? Please?
Continued tomorrow.